King of the Dead (Jeremiah Hunt Chronicle) (12 page)

Hendricks nodded vigorously. “I’ll tell you everything I can remember.”

“Take me through it, please.”

Hendricks did so in a professional manner, explaining how he’d spotted the Charger headed south with a taillight out and the decision he’d made to pull the car over and issue a traffic citation. There had been three people in the vehicle: two males and a female.

“The driver was wearing sunglasses, if you can believe that.”

“Sunglasses?”

“Yeah. Crazy, right? Guy claimed it was because he had some kind of health condition that made his eyes sensitive to the light. I made him take them off anyway.”

Robertson leaned forward, suddenly eager. “What color were his eyes?” he asked. He’d seen Hunt without his sunglasses; it was a sight you weren’t apt to forget. If the man in the car had been Hunt, there was only one answer that would make sense …

“White. Completely white. I’ll never forget that as long as I live.”

The state trooper actually shivered as he said it, seeming to be as creeped out by the memory of it as he’d been when it happened. Robertson didn’t blame him; looking into Hunt’s face and having those milky white eyes stare back at you was a downright unpleasant experience.

But it was Hunt. The eyes and the tattoos confirmed it.

“What can you tell me about the woman who was with him?”

Hendricks thought about it for a minute. “To be honest, I didn’t get a real good look at her. Dark hair, narrow face, that’s about all I can tell you.”

Robertson drummed his fingers impatiently against the tabletop. That wasn’t what he wanted to hear. He had no idea who the woman was and that bothered him. That she was helping Hunt was clear, but Robertson didn’t know why. Knowing who she was would go a long way to helping him answer that question, which in turn might lead them to Hunt.

But Officer Hendricks wasn’t done.

“If she hadn’t started screaming,” he said, “he never would have gotten the drop on me.”

Robertson’s heart rate went up slightly as they got to the heart of the issue. He was close; he could feel it. He decided to pretend he didn’t know what the other man was talking about in order to see if he could pull more details out of him.

“I’m sorry. Did you say screaming? About what?”

Hendricks’s eyes got wider and Robertson felt his pulse suddenly speed up. There was more to the incident than what Hendricks had included in his report.

“What aren’t you telling us?”

Under the close scrutiny of the two federal agents, Hendricks coughed up the rest of what had happened that night. He told them how the female passenger had started screaming and how the driver had thrown something in his eyes, maybe a dust or a powder perhaps, that had allowed them to escape when he was unable to see.

He was clearly embarrassed by it all and kept looking away during his explanation, which told Robertson that even now he wasn’t telling the whole truth. There was still something else.

To Robertson’s surprise, Agent Doherty decided to speak up at that point.

“Let me get this straight. You pull him over, the chick starts screaming, and in all the confusion he throws pixie dust in your face to disable you? Do I have that right?”

Hendricks mumbled something.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that,” Doherty said.

“It wasn’t pixie dust.”

“Then what was it?”

“I don’t know.”

Doherty laughed, playing the bad cop routine to a T. “Of course you don’t. You were only hit in the face with it and presumably had to clean it out of your eyes before you could see again, but you don’t have any idea what it was. Does that make any sense to you, Officer?”

Hendricks was starting to bristle. “It wasn’t like that. Wasn’t like that at all!”

“So tell me what it was like then! And stop lying to me or I’ll have your ass in a cell faster than you ever imagined possible!”

Robertson watched the exchange without a word. Doherty had taken Hendricks right to the edge and now it was time to reel him in.

As Hendricks opened his mouth to protest, Robertson leaned forward and said softly, “Where did you get the bruises, Hendricks?”

The question caught the man completely off guard, just as it was intended to. For a second you could see it on his face as he struggled to hold his story together and fit this new element into the overall fabric of the tale, but it was just too much for him and he finally gave up the ghost and sagged in his seat.

“He touched me.”

It was barely even a whisper, but it was enough.

“He touched you? What’s that supposed to mean?” Doherty asked, his voice growing harsh, but Robertson waved him off with a quick hand signal. Now was not the time to break out the heavy guns. They needed skill and finesse at this point in the game.

Hendricks looked at Robertson, a pleading look in his eyes. “You guys are going to think I’m nuts.”

Robertson shrugged. “Try us.”

Hendricks sighed, then shrugged. “The woman in the front seat started screaming and thrashing around, like she was on drugs or something. I didn’t know what was going on and so I put my hand on my gun, ready to draw it if necessary. When I was looking at her, the driver reached out and grabbed my wrist.”

“And?” Robertson gently prodded.

“And I went blind. One minute I could see, the next I couldn’t. Everything went completely dark.”

Robertson had conducted hundreds of interviews during his time with the Bureau and had gotten pretty good at picking out the liars from those who were telling the truth. Hendricks wasn’t bullshitting him; he really believed that Hunt’s touch had done something to his eyesight.

“Then what happened?”

Another sigh. “The son of a bitch hit me. And kept hitting me until I lost consciousness.”

That explained the bruises on his face and the delay in reporting the incident, which ultimately had let Hunt and his companions escape.

Robertson sat back and thought for a minute. “Did you feel anything when he touched you? A nick or a sharp little jab, perhaps?” he asked after a time.

Hendricks shook his head, but it was Doherty who picked up on his line of reasoning.

“You think he was drugged,” the agent said.

Robertson nodded. “It’s possible, certainly. He might have been holding a needle of some kind and jabbed you with it when he grabbed your hand. If he’d coated the tip of the needle with some kind of psychotropic compound, it could account for your sudden inability to see.”

For the first time since he’d entered the room, Officer Hendricks seemed to buck up. If he’d been drugged, the fugitive’s escape wouldn’t have been entirely his fault.

“Would you mind submitting to a few blood tests, Officer?” Robertson asked, and the other man immediately agreed. It had been a few days, and any traces of whatever it was had probably long since fled his system, but it was worth a try nonetheless.

They spent a few more minutes going back through Hendricks’s recollection of the events of that evening, but didn’t learn anything more. Hendricks hadn’t written down the license plate number before he’d been jumped, and the time he’d spent unconscious had wiped it from his mind.
It was too bad
,
really
, Robertson thought. If they’d had that plate number, they could’ve identified the car’s passenger. That, in turn, might have led to some information on where Hunt was headed next.

When they were certain that they had gotten everything out of Officer Hendricks that they could, they thanked him for his help, suggested he take a few days off to deal with his emotional state, and let him get back to his regular duties. Once he had left the room, Robertson turned to his temporary partner.

“Well done, Agent Doherty. Well done, indeed.”

The younger man practically beamed at his boss’s praise, but quickly grew sober again.

“But now what?” he asked. “We know he’s out there, but we knew that before coming here. How are we supposed to figure out where he went?”

Robertson didn’t know.

Or rather, he corrected himself, he didn’t know
yet
. But in the ten years he’d been hunting the Reaper, he’d been in this position many times, and something always pointed him in the right direction. This time it would happen as well. He just had to be patient.

17

HUNT

Dismayed at how poorly my conversation with Denise and Dmitri had gone, I kept to myself for most of the day, figuring that a little space would help heal the rift that had developed between us. My nerves were still a wreck, however, so I decided to do the tourist thing to make me forget about it.

I had one of Gallagher’s people call a cab for me and asked to be taken into the city. With the lake on one side and the river on the other, New Orleans had always been flavored with the smell of dirty water and rotting vegetation, but since Katrina a stench pervaded everything, soaked deep into the wood and stone, a constant reminder of how close the city had come to drowning. The air was thick with moisture even now, in midwinter, and I wondered how anyone could live in this place year-round and not constantly feel the need to wash the slick film it left behind from their skin.

I did the usual tourist routine—caught a streetcar ride through the Garden District, had a po’boy for lunch in Jackson Square, sat for an hour or two in Preservation Hall listening to some excellent jazz.

By the time the sun went down, I was ready for the French Quarter and Bourbon Street.

Music filled the air: loud, raucous music that spoke to me of life and liberty, of want and excess, and called to me at some deeper, primal level, making me want to lose myself in its rhythms. Horns rang out, in counterpoint to the beat of the drums, and the lonesome wail of a sax rose above them both, drifting over it all from somewhere a few blocks away.

The streets were narrow, the buildings close together, with secret courtyards and hidden gardens scattered throughout the maze so I was never quite sure what I was going to find when I turned a corner. Light spilled from open doorways, punctuated by the gleam and glow of neon signs, but by sticking to the shadows and keeping my sunglasses on, I was able to make my way around pretty well. If I occasionally stumbled when I stepped into a pool of light, well, my actions didn’t differ all that much from the antics of many of the street’s other travelers and no one paid much attention to me anyway.

I wandered the streets and wherever I went, the dead went with me.

There was no need for me to call them; they came of their own accord, following in my wake like the children who followed the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Just a handful, at first, and then more as we moved through the night, until I had more than a dozen ghosts following me wherever I went.

They didn’t try to communicate in any way, they never do, but just trailed along behind me, watching everything I did with an intensity that bordered on obsession. I was used to it and barely noticed, but I could tell their presence was having an effect on those around me. My fellow partygoers gave me far more space than anyone else, as if I were surrounded by a force field that extended out from my body for several feet, and the crowd inevitably started to thin out in any establishment that I stayed in for very long.

Still, I did what I could to enjoy the music and have a good time.

For months I’d been worried about showing my face, convinced that the moment I did someone would recognize me and turn me in to the authorities. I’d gone to ground in a big way, determined not to get caught until I figured out some way of clearing my name. But now, in the wake of the argument with Denise and the general sense of foreboding that had been plaguing me ever since I’d stepped foot in the city, somehow that didn’t seem to matter as much. If I was recognized, so be it, I decided. There was more than a hint of fatalism to my decision.

The changes I’d made to my appearance would help a little, as did the sunglasses I used to hide my bone white eyes and the long-sleeved jersey that covered my tattoos, but I was still taking a chance by being out in public.

I tried to keep to the outdoor venues, the kind that occupied the courtyards between the buildings, where most of the lighting was focused on the stage or comprised of something like tiki torches, which weren’t as invasive to the senses. It didn’t take me long to recognize the undercurrent of anxiety, desperation even, that ran through the crowds. Everywhere I went the music seemed a little louder, the booze a little heavier, the partygoers a little too intent on tuning it all out. Once in a while I saw someone wearing a paper mask, as if afraid of catching the “mysterious disease” the news kept yammering about, but for the most part it was business as usual.

Later, I found myself wandering a bit farther afield than the tourists usually did. The streets were narrower, the shadows a bit deeper, and the few tourists hurried through as if they didn’t belong. The sound of a saxophone drew me in and I followed it until I found its source. An old black man with hair the color of wet snow sat upon a short stool, his horn to his lips. I even recognized the song, “Lover Man,” by the great Charlie Parker. It was the kind of tune that started out slow and languid, a lazy ride on a peaceful river, and then sped up into a rousing melody that took real skill to play.

The old man was good, better than good, really, and it was a pleasure to sit on the curb and listen to him play. He started into another number right after finishing “Lover Man,” one I didn’t recognize, but that was fine too. His music picked and pulled at me, the way good music will, and I soon found myself with my harmonica in my hand, waiting for the right moment to join in, then riffing off his melody into a substrain all my own that rose and fell alongside his without missing a beat.

The dead began to gather around us in greater numbers, called by the music we were making. I shot a glance at the old man, wondering if he knew they were there, but if he did he paid them no mind and just continued in search of that elusive melody, that perfect refrain.

We played that way for a while, with only the dead for company, and when we were done we thanked each other for the privilege of playing together. Smiling, feeling better than I had in a long time, I pulled a twenty out of my wallet, dropped it into the saxophone case at his feet, and turned to go.